June 2022
Professor Anthony Elliott is Dean of External Engagement at the University of South Australia, where he is Executive Director of the Hawke EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence and Network, and Research Professor of Sociology.
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American fiction writer, essayist and critic who lives in New York. Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University, his best known novels are Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008). He has won many literary awards, including the 2017 Pen America and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his autobiography The Book of My Lives. Irish author Colum McCann has described Hemon as “...quite frankly the greatest writer of our generation”. Hemon frequently publishes in The New Yorker and has also written for Esquire, The Paris Review and the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. He was the keynote speaker at the Alternative Realities Conference in December 2019 with a lecture about what to read and write in the age of Trump.
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Prof Antonio Puliafito is director of the National CINI Smart City Lab and professor of computer engineering at the University of Messina, Italy. His interests include parallel and distributed systems, networking, IoT, Cloud computing and advanced analytical modeling techniques. He contributed to the development of the software tools WebSPN, ArgoPerformance and Stack4Things. He co-authored the book Performance and Reliability Analysis of Computer Systems. He leads the Center for Information Technologies at the University of Messina (CIAM). From 2006 to 2008 he acted as the technical director of the Project 901, winner of the CISCO innovation award. He actively contributed to the success of the TriGrid VL and PI2S2 projects. Prof Puliafito has worked on several EU funded projects such as Reservoir, Vision Cloud, CloudWave, Beacon and Frontier Cities. He was the main investigator of the Italian PRIN2008 research project Cloud@Home, to combine cloud and volunteer computing.
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For four decades Prof. Baglioni has pioneered modern techniques in art conservation and restoration which are detailed in the book he co-edited, Nanoscience for the Conservation of Works of Art. His scientific interests focus on the Physical Chemistry of soft matter systems, both from a fundamental and an applicative point of view. Prof Baglioni gave a Discovery talk in November 2019 to coincide with the Machines of Leonardo exhibition celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Italian maestro’s death. His talk was entitled New Methods and Materials for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage: From Renaissance Frescoes to Modern and Contemporary Art.
Mr Christopher Painter is a globally recognised leader and expert on cyber security, cyber diplomacy and cyber crime. He worked for two years on the National Security Staff of the White House as President Barack Obama’s Senior Director for Cybersecurity. As United States top cyber diplomat (2011-17) he was instrumental in negotiating a landmark agreement regarding the theft of intellectual property with China. Mr Painter has been at the vanguard of U.S. and international cyber issues for over twenty-five years, first as a prosecutor of some of the most high-profile cybercrime cases in the country and then as a senior official at the Department of Justice, FBI, the National Security Council and finally the State Department. He gave a Discovery public lecture on Conducting Diplomacy and Combating Threats in Cyberspace in September 2019.
Prof Van Der Wal is interested in platelet signalling and her current project focuses on the platelet responses of apheresis platelet donors. During her PhD (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), she demonstrated that novel death pathways were triggered in cold-stored platelets as a result of molecular changes in one of the platelet adhesion receptors. Some patients suffering from bleeding disorder Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) are unresponsive to current treatments. Prof Patricia Maguire supervised Prof Van der Wal as she expanded her research into extracellular vesicles. “I am most excited about joining forces and coming up with new out-of-the-box research ideas and potentially foster and rekindle other European collaborations with scientists in the field,” said Prof van der Wal. “Moreover, this fellowship will expand my research at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service as well as helping me to grow further as a senior scientist.”
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Prof Winfield's research interests include robot ethics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and open science. Prof Winfield is “committed to the widest possible dissemination of research and ideas in science, engineering and technology” and believes “that robots provide us with a wonderful vehicle for public engagement.. & intelligent robots will become ubiquitous in the near future and we therefore need to start a dialogue now about the ethical and moral questions that will arise.” He gives two reasons for his fascination with robots: 1) They are complex and potentially useful machines that embody just about every design challenge and discipline there is. 2) They allow us to address some deep questions about life, emergence, culture and intelligence in a radically new way, that is by building models. His keynote Discovery public lecture in July 2019 was on Engineering and Ethics of Ethical Machines.
Her research interests span criminology, fundamental rights and human geography. From the mid-1990s she held lectureships in criminology and criminal justice, first in the law faculty at the University of Sheffield and subsequently at the University of Leeds. She was a research fellow for two years at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and has been a consultant to the UN International Narcotics Control Board. She was a regular study fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg. Dr Goodey is the author of the academic textbook Victims and Victimology: Research, Policy and Practice (2005) and co-editor of the book Integrating a Victim Perspective within Criminal Justice: International Perspectives (2000). Her keynote Discovery public lecture was on AI and Fundamental Rights: Not Only a Question of Ethics.
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The head judge on popular BBC series Robot Wars he has held a number of research and teaching positions in the UK (Essex, Exeter, Sheffield) and the USA (Yale and Stanford).
Co-founder of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, Prof Sharkey has highlighted racism, sexism and bias in algorithms and the need for human supervision of Lethal Autonomous Weapons [LAWs]
He has moved freely across academic disciplines, lecturing in departments of engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science.
He holds a doctorate in experimental psychology and a doctorate of science and was an EPSRC senior media fellow (2004-2010). In April 2019 Prof Sharkey gave a Discovery Public Talk entitled Algorithmic Injustice and Artificial Intelligence in Peace and War.
She is one of the world’s leading experts on machine understanding of human facial behaviours. She leads the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group [iBUG] at Imperial College, which has developed face recognition software now used in some Mercedes-Benz models. She has also led the development of an algorithm that tracks people’s faces while they watch advertisements to judge how they respond - or not. Another of her projects involves using robots to teach facial expressions to children who have autism. At Samsung Prof Pantic is working on an algorithm that looks at eye movement to better understand and diagnose dementia.
Her Discovery talk in May 2018 was called Artificial Intelligence: What if Machines Could Sense How I Feel? It was followed by a discussion moderated by Adrian Weckler, group technology editor of the Irish Independent.
Kathleen Richardson is professor of ethics and culture of robots and AI at De Montfort University, Leicester. She is director of the Campaign Against Sex Robots and senior research fellow in Ethics of Robotics and part of the Europe-wide DREAM project (Development of Robot-Enhance Therapy for Children with AutisM). Prof Richardson completed her PhD at the Department of Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Her fieldwork was an investigation of the making of robots in labs at MIT. After her PhD she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (BAPDF) at University College London. Her postdoctoral work was an investigation into the therapeutic uses of robots for children with autism spectrum conditions. Prof Richardson wrote the books An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines and Challenging Sociality? An Anthropology of Robots, Autism and Attachment. Her Discovery public lecture in November 2017 was entitled A Human Attachment Crisis: Can the Robots Save us?
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Margaret Boden OBE is research professor of cognitive science at the University of Sussex where she helped develop the world’s first academic programme in cognitive science. She holds degrees in medical sciences, philosophy and psychology and integrates these disciplines with AI in her research. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (and its British and European equivalents). She was appointed scientific advisor to the APPG (All-Party Parliamentary Group) on AI.
Prof Boden’s books include The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (1990/2004), Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (2006), and AI, Its Nature and Future (2016). Her Discovery public lecture in September 2017 was on AI and the Future.
Prof Tom McLeish is a theoretical physicist and the first chair of natural philosophy at the University of York. His work is renowned for improving our understanding of the properties of soft matter, such as liquids, foams and biological materials. His Discovery public lecture in May 2017 was entitled Faith and Wisdom in Science and was based on his eponymous book. Prof McLeish is both a scientist and a lay reader in the Anglican church, which means he is licenced to preach and conduct some religious services but not licenced to celebrate the Eucharist. His book explores how and why, contrary to popular belief, science and religion are “utterly compatible”. The Guardian newspaper described it as “a rich, crowded and discursive book”. Listen to Dr Aoibheann Ni Shuilleabhain’s interview with Prof McLeish here.
Dr Mazdak Ghajari (MIMechE, CEng) had a pioneering role in establishing the TBI biomechanics research area at Imperial College, bringing together engineers, neuroscientists, biologists and designers. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College Aeronautics with focus on TBI prevention and followed this with a few PostDoc positions in the areas of smart structures, composite materials and computational methods. He then secured an Imperial College research fellowship to launch his independent research on understanding the biomechanics of TBI and preventing it. He then joined the Dyson School of Design Engineering, where he founded the HEAD lab, an interdisciplinary research lab for understanding and preventing injury through design. His work has brought him the young researcher award of the International Research Council of Biomechanics of Injury (IRCOBI). His 2020 lecture is entitled "Predicting and preventing brain trauma at the cutting-edge intersection between engineering and medicine”.
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